User Experience

For the ZPower Recharchable Battery System, Bridge brought together ingenious engineering with smart consumer-oriented industrial design. The system recharges batteries used in hearing aids, and works with most models of major brands.

The tiny size of most hearing aid batteries – and their relatively short battery life – make them extremely difficult for users to handle, and require reinstalling every few weeks. ZPower’s patent-protected battery technology allows for 24+ hours of power on a single charge, and battery changing about once a year.

ZPower wanted a design that allowed patients – often elderly – great ease in recharging the batteries nightly, and equal facility for them or their audiologist’s office to replace the battery once a year – regardless of the hearing aid brand.

Industrial Design Solution

Users of the rechargeable batteries place them on a charging “dock” each night. Bridge’s industrial design team turned to museums to inspire the look and ease of use of the charging station. Just as museums use the same pedestal to display different sculptures, the Zpower charger serves in essence as a “pedestal” onto which different models of hearing aids are easily placed. The design is clean, elegant and efficient.

Engineering Solution

Bridge helped create a design that uses only two custom components for each hearing aid model: a custom shell for the battery door on the hearing aids, and a custom cradle on the charger where the hearing aids sit. All other components in the modified battery door and the charger are common betweenevery hearing aid brand or model.

XIMEDICA ACQUIRES BRIDGE DESIGN

Press Release

August 18, 2015

Ximedica and Bridge Design Join Forces, Setting a New Bar for MedTech Development

PROVIDENCE, RI & MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL, MN, SAN FRANCISCO, CA (August 18, 2015) – XIMEDICA, a leading, full service, medical technologies development firm, today, announced that it has acquired Bridge Design. The acquisition of Bridge Design, based in San Francisco, CA, provides Ximedica with a West Coast hub and an expanded front-end offering of leading-edge design services for physical and digital products, including mHealth.

The acquisition sets the stage for the East-Coast MedTech innovator to enter the country’s foremost high-tech capital, creating a bi-coastal, one-stop-shop union that marries best in class expertise with that of its new subsidiary.

“This partnership has been formed to broaden the strength, reach and scale of Ximedica’s comprehensive development offering,” says Randall S. Barko, Ximedica’s Chief Executive Officer and President. “Ximedica brings the regulated systems, procedures and expertise to complement Bridge Design’s two-plus decades of award-winning design in MedTech. By combining these strengths, we bring high value to our clients, offering a cost-effective development approach and a depth of expertise aligned with industry trends for digitally connected solutions.”

Says Aidan Petrie, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder of Ximedica, “This is about two organizations who share the same innovative DNA locking arms and setting a new bar for the design and development of medical technologies.”

Bridge Design, a Ximedica Company, will continue operating out of its current office in San Francisco, drawing on the back-end capabilities of Ximedica to expand offerings with existing clients while servicing new relationships with key clients on the West Coast.

“By joining forces with Ximedica,” says Bill Evans, President of Bridge Design, “we will be able to respond to an increasing demand from our client base for a more comprehensive offering. We believe this will resonate deeply as major growth areas like mHealth build strength. In addition, we are looking forward to scaling our team and talent and fueling a common hunger to solve substantive design problems withelegant and engaging solutions.”

Ximedica’s Westward move ties into an ongoing expansion strategy started in the Fall of 2014 when SV Life Sciences, a Boston-based private equity firm, purchased a majority stake in the firm. Says Barko, “Eight months ago we partnered with SV Life Sciences and embarked on the next phase of our global growth strategy. The acquisition of Bridge Design moves us further down that path. Bringing together top design and integrated engineering is nothing short of a powerful synergy and we look forward to seeing the impact we can create ahead.”

About Ximedica

Ximedica is a full-service ISO 13485-certified and FDA-registered product development firm. For 30 years Ximedica has provided a unique growth platform enabling organizations to successfully deploy medical technology products into the market. Its headquarters are in Providence, R.I., with offices in Hong Kong and Minneapolis, and now San Francisco. In November of 2014, SV Life Sciences, a Boston-based private equity firm, purchased a majority stake in Ximedica. www.ximedica.com

About Bridge Design

Bridge Design, based in San Francisco, has focused for more than two decades on award-winning design of medical and life sciences products – physical and digital. Bridge’s expertise in Design Strategy, Industrial Design and User Experience, fluently merges with Engineering. Clients range from Fortune 500 to startups, including device manufacturers, pharmaceutical, life science firms, as well as companies in consumer health and wellness. www.bridgedesign.com

Bill Evans, founder of Bridge Design, will speak about “The Next Wave of Healthcare Innovation” at the IDSA International Conference next week in Seattle, Wash.

Healthcare is an integral part of our social infrastructure. Two major demographic and economic factors will dominate the future of global healthcare in the next 50 years – in both the developed and the developing world. They are aging and spending per capita. Bill will outline these trends and how they will impact designers and consumers of healthcare products and services across the globe. He also will speak on how technology and innovation—with the aid of designers—can help shape the healthcare ecosystem of the future.

In the group’s own words, Open mHealth is dedicated to “breaking down the barriers to integration and bringing clinical meaning to digital health data.”

By consulting with clinical experts, data scientists, developers, and software architects, the Open mHealth organization is setting standards to create a specific format for health data.

At Bridge, we work on many products addressing chronic health issues, including diabetes or COPD. In these and other chronic conditions, we see so much clinical data that is critical to help patients and physicians coming from multiple devices and platforms in an often confusing delivery. Imagine instead, however, if blood glucose levels were shared in a common schema, regardless of where the data came from.

Participants at the conference demonstrated new tools, such as:

– Hipbone for iOs
This app downloads and serializes all your data to a dropbox.

– Linq
This online platform enables patients to upload information from their devices to use by a doctor. It is currently in a pilot at Stanford Preventive Cardiology.

Some interesting insights from the conference:

From the General Discussion:

– Pain – physical and mental – has huge health implications, but data is difficult to gather and measure.
– Designing for health is different than designing for healthcare. The first focuses more on the concerns of the users. The second needs to consider the entire healthcare system and all stakeholders.

From Patients:
– They would agree to collect more data and share that personal information with doctors but they don’t feel they get much in return.

From Doctors:
– They feel there is no time to load and look at all the data that patients bring in the office.
– They are unclear on what data is actionable – or which app and data is most valuable.
– They feel the the less data, the better.

We’re thrilled to share the news that our client’s product, the OrayaIRay® Radiotherapy System, has won Silver in the 2015 Annual Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) in the Radiological and Electromechanical Devices category.

Bridge worked in close collaboration with the team at Oraya Therapeutics, Inc. to design and engineer the IRay System from conception to commercialization. The product treats wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in those over 65 in the industrialized world, and reflects a significant breakthrough treatment approach.

“The success of any innovative product in the start-up medical world is a combination of the foresight of the founders, the effectiveness of their core technology, and the people they pick to help make it a reality,” said Bridge Design President Bill Evans. “We are honored to have been chosen as Oraya‘s design partner and glad that our contribution to the usability and customer appeal has helped Oraya achieve rapid adoption. Oraya brought us into their fold, integrating us with their technical and marketing teams. From this teamwork comes the product you see. It is rewarding for our designers to be involved in such vision-maintaining therapy, and we wish Oraya well as they expand into new treatment sites.”

Bridge conducted extensive ergonomic studies to gain a clear understanding of physicians’ and patients’ needs, and to inform the development of the product for an international market. Streamlined, easy operator steps that could reduce procedure time and increase overall patient comfort were also vital to the design.

“We, alongside our partner Bridge Design, are honored to be recognized with this prestigious award,” said Jim Taylor, president and CEO of Oraya Therapeutics. “Our goal in designing and developing the IRay system was to offer ophthalmologists and their patients an innovative, comfortable and non-invasive treatment option for wet AMD to reduce injections while maintaining vision. We believe that physician ease-of-use and patient comfort have played a significant role in the rapid adoption of Oraya Therapy in Europe and its continued integration into standard clinical care.”

The IRay® Radiotherapy SystemSystem stereotactically delivers low-voltage X-rays for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The system’s relatively small footprint is designed for installation in a clinic or hospital, without the need for added room shielding, and to be easy for the trained ophthalmologist to operate. The key proprietary elements of the system consist of a low-energy x-ray tube, a self-contained automated beam positioning system, Oraya Therapy software, the I-Guide™ eye stabilization device and an eye tracking system. Combining these elements into a product that would be attractive as well as providing reliability and efficiency with patient workflow was critical.

Oraya therapy is available at 11 sites in three countries including the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland, and additional sites are in active planning stages. The IRay system is CE marked in Europe and is an investigational device not available for sale in the United States.